I totally agree with you that the Handshake session was not an effective solution. But if the project budget can't afford any physical meeting for the participants, it seems that this is better than nothing ;-) Anyway, I forgot to mention that in our trials, we also asked individual students and facilitators to set up a personal blog to share their backgrounds - something similar to KNOW ME BETTER before they started to collaborate on some "real" tasks. However, some students were so lazy that they just put one line of text in their blogs, whereas the others almost put their whole family history there :-)

Another reason for not choosing a collocated workshop in these contexts might have been the geographical distance, which would have needed more organizational and monetary effort to bridge. This interpretation is also supported by reports of successful collocated workshops among individual community cultures. However, if a collocated workshop was an optimal solution to initiating such international collaboration, organizers might have taken this burden. Nevertheless, the resulting context was similar to the other cases. Since collaboration could not be initiated collocatedly, universities chose another solution to initiate collaboration. One collaborative task was given in the first week that aimed at connecting the students' distinctive local cultural environments, personalities and the design subjects or briefs. This analysis led to a newly identified design hypothesis presented in a thumbnail below:
DH7: KNOW ME BETTER: An asynchronous collaborative design research task that connects the exploration of the collaborator's local culture and personality with the project brief, initiates collaboration and prepares for the challenges of coordinating local design processes among distributed local teams.
This task combines Collective and Individual Community orientations because it introduces cultural and personal values to the remote partners. Using this design solution results in a similar context. Computer-supported collaboration tools can be introduced and tested by the partners in order to establish a communication strategy and pattern for the collaborative project. The asynchronism of this task bridges the considerably larger time difference between those remote teams than Hong Kong and Korea or Taiwan.